Twitter Wars: Me and Nicolette

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

7 years ago

Nicolette Sheridan isn’t on Twitter. But there are no less than four fake accounts (at the time of this post) pretending to be her. And I seem to have ended up ‘taking her on’ as my @jorjafoxonline account after telling her I thought she was fake, and saying I’d only apologize IF and WHEN she posted a picture of herself with her Twitter Handle.

At a certain point, I stopped talking to her, though I didn’t block her since really, she amused me, and didn’t spam me too much.

A few days ago, I was talking to someone else and said this:

Suddenly, after all these nice days of silence, I get this:

I’m not sure where she thought I was sending her with a link to http://support.twitter.com personally. I mean… it’s a link TO TWITTER. I felt I was being pretty upfront (and I kind of wanted to see what Twitter would do with it).

It went downhill from there:

You can read the whole thing at Bettween, including where she accuses me of running @CelebFakeOuts (I don’t, but I know who does).

At this point, you can see where I stop replying, which is because I blocked her and walked away. I do keep tabs on her, though, since I think it’s best to know where your adversaries are hiding. That’s how I knew she said this:

JOF. Jorja Obsessed Fan. I’m not obsessed with Jorja, but I’ve long since given up with arguing people about that. I mean, either you believe that I’m just a normal fan with some cool skills for webstuff and the Internet, or I’m a freakyass stalker. Up to you. By the way, I don’t delete tweets unless they’ve got some egregious typos or bad links.

I also got these gems:

Finally, on Halloween, @NicSheri posted a clearly photoshopped picture of ‘herself’ holding up a sign prooving she was really Nicolette. I found out when one of my friends passed me this link to Formspring:

Moments later, these posts come out and show up in my RSS feed for @jorjafoxonline (this is how I keep track of people I’ve blocked and when they tweet at me, by the way):

I don’t claim to be a Nicolette fan (I know who she is, which is more than I can say of many actors on shows I don’t watch), but even I could see that was faked. I passed on the image link to some people who know better, and they sorted out that it was a screencap of a Desperate Housewives episode. How tragic. People start to bitch that it’s a fake, and she screams ‘I’ve been hacked!’ The image is deleted, many ‘fake’ Formspring replies are deleted (though not that one…) and she accuses many people (though not me!) of hacking her.

I don’t know about you, but the fact that she specifically goes after me demanding an apology (because I told her I would when she ‘proved’ she was really Nicolette) is proof that she’s not. Unless of course she thinks I’m the hacker. Sorry, I don’t care enough about you. Hell, I don’t even care enough about the fake Jorja’s to bother with that sort of shit. Hacking is not for petty harassment or vindictiveness. I’d much rather nail you legally. It’s more fun. By the way, the image was debunked by a Nicolette Fan Site (click on the image for the full link).

She’s blocked me as @jorjafoxonline, though still Tweets at me from time to time, and I’ve blocked her as both that and @ipstenu so my Twitter Stream is blissfully Faker Free right now. The best I can do about her is to block her and encourage everyone to do the same.

Will Twitter ever grow up about these things? I don’t know. I find it disappointing that they have no policy or steps to handle this sort of thing. It took them a long time to sort out spam. There was a month or so in 2009 where Twitter was basically unusable because of the API spam everyone was getting (see Chris Brogan’s post on the matter). One of the ways they helped was to make sure you don’t get DMs from people who aren’t following you. Of course, the spammers turned to @-mentions instead, but eventually Twitter sorted things out. They made a ‘Block and report as spam’ option, which helps a lot.

I’m advocating for the ‘Block and report as Bully’ or ‘Block and report Harassment’, where you have to explain WHAT is the harassment. If 50 people all block someone and report them for harassment, you’d think ‘Hmm, something’s up!’ right? What about 150? What about 1500? Twitter doesn’t want to get in between users, claiming that “Twitter is an opt-in service that allows its users to choose what content they receive.”